Mostly regarding in M+ content:
Are bears health bars spiky? Like prot pally or Bdk, when taking damage? Is it anywhere near like prot warrior?
In regards to Ironfur; I know it increases armor, but that only defends against physical damage, yeah? How many stacks should be sustained? Ive seen it up to 9, but then im rage starved.
WoWhead says stats should be Haste/Vers. Would Haste/Mast be viable?
Is it easy to play, or forgiving? Like, sometimes I know if I dont hit a defense on time with my pally, I can be toasted. Fortunately, paladins have tons of oh crap buttons. Does guardian have anything like that?
Anyone willing to offer insight, I appreciate it. Bored to death with paladin. But dont want to invest weeks of effort to be disappointed with guardian playstyle. Like I dont wanna be ilvl 625, and watch my health go from 100% to 50% at the start of each pull.
From a healer point of view (druid, sham and paladin) bears are really easy to heal, I can kind of ignore them and make sure team is ok. Have not done higher keys on any healer so might not be true of non-trivial content.
Ive played bear up to 3k a few times.
Basics:
- if you go into a pull without some sort of defensives running, IF (ironfur) counts, you can be 1 tapped quite easily.
- IF can be stacked as many times as you have rage for it and the stacks last. During Incarn you can easily get 12+
- between Barkskin, Rage of the Sleeper, Survival Instincts (SI), and Elunes Chosen Hero talents, you’ll never really be starved for defensives options at the start of each pull
- Frenzied Regen is the best, imo, self heal for any tank in the game use it as iften as you want when you get comfortable with damage ibtakes
- Verse is better than mastery because A) it gives you nore damage and B) more defensives
Bears do in fact have slightly spikey health bars, but we can take care of ourselves with frenzied regen and the like.
Iron fur does only help vs physical damage and scales with agility so depending on gear you will hit the armor cap at 5-8 stacks. Don’t worry overly much about rage starving yourself in m+ as every global possible should be spent on generating rage, you should almost never be spending rage on maul in m+ except in rare circumstances where there is almost no tank damage. Like the last boss of dawnbreaker.
We are super easy to play, but you need to know when to use your defensives as we are very squishy with nothing going at all. It is probably somewhat similar to prot paladin in this case but our cd’s are pretty easy to chain compared to them.
Our tree is abysmal sadly, there is very little wiggle room and you will always feel like the best talents are JUST out of reach, you lose quite a bit of survive by trying to sneak in some extra damage.
We are more that capable of tanking up to +12 with relative ease! Some mobs are brutal for us like the big golem guys around boss 2 in grim batol and pretty much anything thats pure ele damage. I am more cat then bear at this point, but I love tankin’ as a big old dumb bear.
Also don’t forget to get your free incarn as the key drops, 30 second duration big cd for free!
See, I did not know this. I also figured that maybe Bear just scaled better at higher ilvls. I also thought of two more questions if you dont mind answering.
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Do we have to face-tank the mobs, say like with warrior or pally, since they have shields and that makes sense? As in, if I turn my back to a mob, is it going to murder me?
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What utility does a Guardian bring that would make it stand out? I know it has Brez, which I dont believe to be that unique anymore. And Stampeding Roar?
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Can bears do big pull and do big damage? Im really used to big pulls on prot pally, and, up until they dps nerfed us, I was doing 4mil dps on some big pulls.
When there’s a lot of magic damage going out, yes.
I think you get max physical damage reduction after 5 stacks. Maintaining 2 is fine for the most part (more on Fort weeks if you’re not in 10+), more if you’ve got nothing better to spend your rage on (like when playing Elune’s Chosen).
ilvl > all. Although high haste does feel better as it allows more rage generation which means more rage spending (and gcd cooldowns). You’ll be fine with Haste/Mastery.
Not really. We don’t have anything to press to bring back from the brink of death, but we do have quite a few defensive buttons to push to keep us from getting to that point to start with. Druid is pretty straight forward though and has enough defensives to pretty much always have something available for when you need it.
This entirely depends on how you pull. If you pull pack to pack, this is going to happen quite a bit. I know some of the dungeons have decent gaps in them between pulls which can lead to this, but this happens with every tank. Even rolling into a fresh pull with a defensive running, unless a healer has an instant cast heal, or are 2/3s the way through the cast on their first heal on you when you run into the first pack, you’re gonna get chunked right out of the gate. But we do have our own heals that can heal back millions per tick if needed too!
Now go out there and /dance !
Bears are spiky until you get a few stacks of iron fur rolling. Sadly you have to pop a cd to ease into the pack. Once the fur is strong, it’s smooth sailing.
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